Monk

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start. The next administration is going to face a set of challenges unlike any in recent memory. There is an ongoing military operation in Iraq that still costs $10 billion a month, a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is not going well and is not easily fixed. Iran, Russia and Venezuela present tough strategic challenges.

Domestically, the bailout and reform of the financial industry will take years and hundreds of billions of dollars. Health-care costs, unless curtailed, will bankrupt the federal government. Social Security, immigration, collapsing infrastructure and education are all going to get much worse if they are not handled soon.

And the American government is stretched to the limit. Between the Bush tax cuts, homeland-security needs, Iraq, Afghanistan and the bailout, the budget is looking bleak. Plus, within a few years, the retirement of the baby boomers begins with its massive and rising costs (in the trillions).

Obviously these are very serious challenges and constraints. In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, it is simply not true.

-- Fareed Zakaria for Newsweek

This blog has been a bit Palin heavy, but it's such a striking political moment, so bizarre. And Zakaria is not a ranty leftist. There is this sense that anything can happen, and little of it good. And, of course, big-breasted babes always capture my imagination.

♠
So, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam. Bin Laden began his struggle hoping to topple the Saudi regime. He is now aligned with the Saudi monarchy as it organizes against Shiite domination. This necessarily limits Al Qaeda's broader appeal and complicates its basic anti-Western strategy.

-- Fareed Zakaria for Newsweek

Beyond the implications of the ensuing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites for al-Qaida, Mr. Zakaria argues that it is through this civil war that we may see the path for Islam's own de-radicalizing and liberalizing Reformation. That would certainly be a good end, but it looks like a long, bloody way there.

The worst result, of course, is for the radical, revolutionary forces to win, in which case they would then be united to resume in earnest the Jihad against America and the West. The funny thing is that those forces exist in both the Sunni and Shiite sides. Mr. Zakaria argues that we should not take sides in this sectarian warfare, which sounds wise, since it is not clear how to take sides to our advantage and to realize a more peaceful world. Indeed, it can look like that civil war is only about who will lead the jihad as well as the new Muslim world, but we can jump off that bridge when we reach it.

( Zakaria column )

xXx

~
Rising oil prices are making themselves felt again. Although we are not coming close to the long gas lines of the 1970s, the political turmoil in the Mideast makes for an ominous picture. We will tag a couple of pieces to capture some of the sense of this time.

Mr. John Tierney of The New York Times gives us an optimistic perspective, focusing on the long term, arguing that human ingenuity has always afforded society only more plentiful and cheaper natural resources - Cornucopian economics. One is more impressed with the fact that Tierney is moved to offer such a counterveiling argument.

However, even if the Cornucopian model were true, and should continue to be true, Mr. Fareed Zakaria offers a more sober analysis for the near term. Oil money takes away incentives for non-democratic regimes to reform and become more liberal democratic, and more directly, more oil money means more money into terrorist coffers.

And we also have that old joke that in the long term we are all dead.

( Oil columns )

xXx